Saturday, January 15, 2011

Stuxnet Called an Israeli-US Joint Project

A report in the New York Times gives evidence that Stuxnet, the computer worm which appears to have done material damage to Iranian nuclear weapons development, was developed by an Israeli-US team at an Israeli facility.

The Dimona complex in the Negev desert has long been the reputed, but unacknowledged center for Israeli nuclear development. The Times cites "intelligence and military experts familiar with [Dimona's] operations" as saying that over the past 2 years Dimona has served as a testing facility for efforts to undermine Iranian nuclear weapons development.

Israel has acquired and tested, at Dimona, using centrifuges "virtually identical" to those used by Iran. This scenario is reasonable in that it explains how such sophisticated attack software worked when it finally reached its intended targets in Iran. Whoever wrote it had to test it, and they needed access to Siemens SCADA systems and centrifuges identical, or nearly so, to those used by Iran.